What We Do
At the National P-3 Center, we use three core strategies to achieve our mission: providing leadership and professional learning opportunities, offering support and resources to guide effective implementation of policy and practice, and conducting innovative research and evaluation studies.
National P-3 CenterCore Strategies
Our three strategies deliberately overlap and complement one another. Throughout all of our work, we create new ideas and knowledge; curate promising strategies, tools and resources; convene people to work together toward common goals; and collaborate with others to build shared learning.
Leadership &Professional Learning
We offer professional learning opportunities designed to connect stakeholders, to build shared understandings and practices among leaders in the ECE and PreK-12 systems, and to increase the exchange of ideas between research, policy, and practice. To accomplish this, our work intentionally engages people from ECE and PreK-12 together to build shared knowledge and visions for young children’s learning, enhance technical skills related to organization- and system-level variables, and broaden the scope and scale of P-3 approaches across the country. Our leadership and professional learning efforts are infused with a combination of extended learning time, team-based engagement, and an intentional commitment to applying new knowledge to real-world work.
Explore some of our signature Leadership & Professional Learning offerings below.
Implementation& Practice
We provide a variety of supports and tools to people who are implementing P-3 approaches in their states, school districts, and communities. Our engagement, tools, and resources help field-based teams collaboratively design and refine cross-sector strategies and comprehensive P-3 approaches. We also develop and disseminate tools and resources to guide effective implementation and highlight promising P-3 approaches across the country.
The Framework for Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating P-3 Approaches anchors much of our implementation and practice work, coupled with a series of tools that support use of the Framework.
These tools include:
- Self-Assessment of readiness to implement P-3
- Priority-Setting
- Designing Theories of Change that Drive Effective Improvement
- Marshaling Resources for Sustainability
Research& Evaluation
We engage in innovative research and evaluation to better understand the implementation of P-3 efforts and share this knowledge with the field. Our research and evaluation approaches are collaborative, applied, and intended to inform continuous improvement of P-3 efforts.
Additionally, being situated in an institution of higher education, we aim to conduct research and evaluation that contribute to the evidence base for P-3 and further conceptualize the issues and opportunities that exist in the field.